Did you know Pretty Woman nearly ended in the death of Julia Roberts’ character?

Yep – before it was bought by Disney, the movie’s original script (which went by 3000) was peppered with drugs and violence. The conglomerate’s purchase transformed the premise of the film. 

In a 2009 conversation with NPR, Peter Sagal, author of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, said a similar process happened to his originally gritty political script.

He says the film came about as the result of his Holocaust play, and originally focused on the Cuban revolution. 

On NPR’s This American Life, Peter (himself the host of NPR’s Wait, Wait... Don’t Tell Me gameshow) said a play he wrote about a Jewish attorney who defended a Holocaust denierclient caught the “attention of this producer Lawrence Bender, who is most well known for being Quentin Tarantino’s producer.”

Peter says Lawrence called him and asked him to write a movie. So, he began working on a script about the Cuban revolution. 

“In my original conception, there were two parallel stories,” he said.

Maria, the American character, was a standard teenage rebel.

“And then there was her romantic interest, a character named Josefo, who was a Cuban and was sort of a third-column rebel underground guy, living and working in Havana to undermine the regime, sometimes through violence.” 

In case you’re starting to suspect that that’s not quite the movie that got made, Peter says that’s because “there is not a single line of dialogue in that movie that I wrote”.

Peter’s script was shelved for years until the producers who owned the rights to Dirty Dancing teamed up with Lawrence Bender (the person Peter wrote the script for). 

The producers focused on one scene from Peter’s script, he says; the moment someone attempts to assassinate a political figure at a dance party. 

Still, Peter seems okay with the transformation, “That’s a much better ending than the ending I thought I had, which was that it was just a disaster,” he said.